Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life
Google engEDU
59 min – Mar 1, 2006

Google TechTalks
March 1, 2006

Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka

ABSTRACT
Linden Lab is the producer of Second Life, an online world with a growing population of subscribers (or "residents"); currently, the community has well over 140,000 residents from 91 countries. By providing residents with robust building and scripting tools, Linden Lab enables them to create a vast array of in-world objects, installations and programs. Since its early stages, Linden Lab has allowed its residents to retain full IP rights over their own creations, thereby insuring that their contributions to the community remain truly their own. Read the rest of this entry »

The <video> Element
Google engEDU
32 min – Mar 29, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

Video is becoming increasingly important content type, and it’s time to make video a first-class citizen on the web. The element is, along with JavaScript bindings, proposed as a simple solution to encourage browsers to support video natively. Equally important is the choice of video format to be used with. I will argue that the success of the web is based on using open standards, and that video should be no exception. I will demo Opera showing Ogg Theora video clips natively.

A demonstration is available here:

http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/video Read the rest of this entry »

What Every Engineer Needs to Know About Security and Where to Learn It
Google engEDU
49 min – Jul 10, 2007

Google Tech Talks
July 10, 2007

ABSTRACT

This talk discusses recent trends in security, and what every engineer needs to know to prevent the most significant emerging threats such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks. Just as every engineer might use object-oriented design principles to achieve extensibility and re-usability, every engineer needs to employ principles such as the principle of least privilege, fail-safe stance, and protecting against the weakest link to achieve security. Instead of focusing on "tips" and "tricks" that allow you to "band-aid" the security of your systems, we discuss how to derive defenses based on the application of security principles, such that you can determine how to deal with new threats as they come along or application-specific threats that might be relevant to your domain. Finally, we present some statistics on the current state of software security vulnerabilities, and discuss existing and upcoming challenges in the field of software security.

Speaker: Neil Daswani Read the rest of this entry »

RUBY: Competitious On Rails
Google engEDU
59 min – Mar 8, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

Kris Rasmussen and Andy Holt from Competitious will be sharing their experience using RoR in a production environment in a new startup. In addition, they’ll explain some of the many advantages Rails has for companies like theirs and smaller teams, as well as some of the disadvantages and gotchas of production Rails apps. Finally, they’ll describe their architecture and cover some unique solutions to common problems, including squeezing extra performance out of AJAX with javascript templates and handling activity logging more elegantly. Read the rest of this entry »

Web Services Middleware: All Grown Up!
Google engEDU
47 min – Nov 8, 2006

Google Tech Talks
November 8, 2006

ABSTRACT
The term Web services carries the connotation of (slowly) doing RPC over SOAP. While many original SOAP toolkits supported and promoted that model (including Apache SOAP which I created), that is not at all what Web services are about. Apache’s history with Web services has seen three generations of efforts: Apache SOAP, Apache Axis and now Apache Axis2.

Axis2 is fundamentally different: instead of treating XML as a hot potato that must be replaced with a language structure immediately, it treats XML lovingly and offers a very clean processing model for XML. Of course it does support data binding for those that want to look a the XML as objects but the core of Axis2 is a pure XML processing architecture.

Axis2 is the basis of a new kind of enterprise middleware. Building on that core stack we have built support for the entire security protocol (Apache Rampart and Rahas) set as well as for reliability (Apache Sandesha) and transactions (Apache Kandula). Apache Synapse is providing ESB like message and service mediation capabilities on top of Axis2.

Axis2 supports both WS-* style services as well as XML-over-HTTP (POX) style services. We’re also working on JSON support and a host of other cool stuff. We support HTTP, SMTP and JMS with other transports on the way (including XMPP).

The Axis2 architecture is being implemented in both Java and C, with the C version bound to PHP and other scripting languages as well as Firefox, IE and other hosts.

In this talk we will introduce the new generation of Apache Web services middleware. Read the rest of this entry »